Reviews: Spider Man Edge Of Time

I had many hours of fun with Shattered Dimensions (currently over thirty) so when this follow up came out I just had to get it. While it was fun it also had some errors.

Story:

The story is that a Bad Future occurs when Peter Parker (Amazing Spider-Man) dies so Miguel O'Hara (Spider-Man 2099) tries to stop it from happening. They have to deal with Walker Sloan and a Brain Washed And Crazy Anti-Venom. However someone else also has a nefarious use for the time traveling device in mind. The story is interesting and has some fun twists. My only gripe with it is that Black Cat feels like she serves no purpose. It feels like the developers needed an Act 2 boss so they just told the writer (Peter David) to put her in the game.

Gameplay:

Here comes my major complaints with the game. Fare warning fellow tropers alot of this will sound like They Changed It Now It Sucks. While combat is still fun both Spider-Men feel a little to similar in how they play. 2099's new ability accelerated decoy feels less useful them the one he had in Shattered Dimension which slowed down time. It feels put in so that the freefall segments would be more difficult. The challenge system has become very annoying in this game. You will get gold, silver, or bronze depending on how you did. Most challenges are repetitive in that it's always about doing something in a certain amount of time or within a certain amount of hits. Combo's are more difficult because if you get hit once it resets making multiple challenges into That One Sidequest. Also now for upgrades to your health and stamina need to collect golden spiders which may be annoying for certain players. To get new costume's you need atleast silver in a chapter. You will be doing the same challenge many times just for one costume. In the end this is where most of my complaints with the game are and it just feels like they tried to fix something that wasn't broke.

Graphics/Sound:

The game has the visual style of 2099 from Shattered Dimensions. It looks good and makes great use of the contrast between orange and blue. Everything sound good in this game. The voice acting is good with Christopher Daniel Barnes and Josh Keaton as 2099 and Amazing respectively. All the other voice actors do their job well.

Overall:

While the story, graphics, and sound are all good the gameplay can just be annoying at times.

A solid follow-up.

The following review is based off the Wii version. Your experience on other systems may vary.

As someone who played and enjoyed Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, I was eager to try the sequel and see how well it matched up to the first.

Overall, this game makes several improvements on the first. The story and the urgency it creates can be felt a bit more and helps connect everything into a tighter storyline. The combat works as well as the first game, allowing you to string together combos from the start instead of buying them. The upgrade system refinements work nicely too, focusing less on buying combo strings and more on acquiring new moves and enhancing them. Not linking the upgrade unlocking to the Web of Challenges is a bit limiting at times when you want more, but it's not so bad in that they come at a steady enough pace to hold one over. Speaking of the Web of Challenges, the addition of medal rankings, ease of access and the ability to retry challenges make it much more fun and allows for much more difficult challenges, adding some quality re-playability. The little tweak of the gold spider icon flashing in proximity to one is also nice, considering those little buggers could be hard to find in the first game.

The only major downside are that the lock-on ability from the first game is gone for some reason, which makes it harder to focus on targets. This was particularly troubling during the boss battles and against the larger foes, but not enough to be crippling. The spider-sense is only a brief flash now, probably to keep from being a game breaker, so that's understandable. It's also a little harder to build up energy for upgrades as well, probably to compensate for the reduced number of them.

On the whole, I'd say this game is a strong follow-up to the first game that improves upon it in several ways. If you enjoyed Shattered Dimensions, you'll most likely like this game as well.

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